Uplink Interference Management for HetNets Stressed by Uniformly Distributed Wide-Band Jammers / Muhammad Qasim

Abstract

Intentional jammers (IJs) can be used by the attackers for launching of distributed denial of service attacks in 5G cellular networks. These adversaries are assumed to have adequate information about the network specifications, such as duration, transmit power and positions. With these assumptions, the IJs gain the ability to disrupt the legitimate communication of the network. Heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets) can be considered a vital enabler for 5G cellular networks. Small base stations (SBSs) are deployed inside macro base station (MBS) in order to improve spectral efficiency and capacity. Due to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing assumption, HetNets’ performance is mainly limited by inter-cell interference (ICI). Additionally, there exist IJs-interference (IJs-I), which significantly degrades the network coverage depending on the IJs’ transmit power levels and their proximity with the target. The proposed work explores the uplink (UL) coverage performance of HetNets in presence of both IJs-I and ICI. Moreover, in order to reduce the effects of ICI and IJs-I, reverse frequency allocation (RFA) is employed which is a proactive interference abating scheme. In RFA, different sub-bands of available spectrum are utilized by MBS and SBS in alternate regions. In the proposed setup bottlenecks in the UL coverage has been investigated in the presence of IJ in Het- Nets. Moreover, RFA is employed to mitigate ICI and IJs-I. The setup is evaluated both analytically as well as with the help of simulation. The results demonstrate considerable UL coverage performance improvement by effectively mitigating IJs-I and ICI.